Re: Scientists discover 7 Earthlike planets orbiting a nearby star

But right around the time the study was published, Gillon noticed that TRAPPIST-1d was behaving oddly. When he went to get a closer look with the Very Large Telescope, the ESO's gigantic observatory in South America's Atacama Desert, he realized that the dip in brightness he thought came from 1d was actually caused by three planets, all transiting at the same time.

I'm pleased the US funds much scientific research. Will this continue under a Conservative government?

Heck yes theres' money in them thar stars!

Actually exciting news, start building the ships!!!

The elites are hoarding more and more of the wealth so that they can escape into space once they get done raping the planet and Climate Change starts accelerating too fast !! Wonder if they'll let Trump go with them ? Naw !!!!!

"The only thing man learns from history is man learns nothing from history"

Re: Scientists discover 7 Earthlike planets orbiting a nearby star

But right around the time the study was published, Gillon noticed that TRAPPIST-1d was behaving oddly. When he went to get a closer look with the Very Large Telescope, the ESO's gigantic observatory in South America's Atacama Desert, he realized that the dip in brightness he thought came from 1d was actually caused by three planets, all transiting at the same time.

The discovery, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, represents the first time astronomers have detected so many terrestrial planets orbiting a single star. Researchers say the system is an ideal laboratory for studying distant worlds and could be the best place in the galaxy to search for life beyond Earth.

“Before this, if you wanted to study terrestrial planets, we had only four of them and they were all in our solar system,” said lead author Michaël Gillon, an exoplanet researcher at the University of Liege in Belgium. “Now we have seven Earth-sized planets to expand our understanding. Yes, we have the possibility to find water and life. But even if we don't, whatever we find will be super-interesting.”

The newly discovered solar system resembles a scaled-down version of our own. The star at its center, an ultra-cool dwarf called TRAPPIST-1, is less than a tenth the size of our sun and about a quarter as warm. Its planets circle tightly around it; the closest takes just a day and a half to complete an orbit and the most distant takes about 20 days. If these planets orbited a larger, brighter star they would be fried to a crisp. But TRAPPIST-1 is so cool that all seven of the bodies are bathed in just the right amount of warmth to hold liquid water. And three of them receive the same amount of heat as Venus, Earth and Mars, putting them in “the habitable zone,” that Goldilocks region where it's thought life can thrive.

Still, “Earthlike” is a generous term to describe these worlds. Though the planets of the TRAPPIST-1 system resemble Earth in terms of size, mass and the energy they receive from their star, there's a lot that makes our planet livable besides being a warm rock. Further observation is required to figure out what the TRAPPIST-1 planets are made of, if they have atmospheres and whether they hold water, methane, oxygen and carbon dioxide — the molecules that scientists consider “biosignatures,” or signs of life.

“You can bet people will be rushing to take those measurements,” said Elisabeth Adams, an exoplanet researcher at the Planetary Science Institute who was not involved in the study. “That's going to be fascinating to see.”

Whatever secrets it may harbor, the TRAPPIST-1 system would surely be a sight to behold. Though the star is small, its nearness to the planets means that, from their perspective, it appears about three times as large as our sun. The outermost planets enjoy the daily spectacle of their neighbors passing across the sky and in front of their shared sun, each world a large dark spot silhouetted against the salmon-colored star. Its dim glow, which skews toward the red and infrared end of the light spectrum, bathes the planets in warmth and paints their skies with the crimson hues of a perpetual sunset.

Gillon and his colleagues have been interested in TRAPPIST-1 since late 2015. Using the European Southern Observatory's Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile, they sensed small dips in the star's brightness at regular intervals. These dips were caused by planets transiting — crossing between the star and Earth — and blocking some of its light. Last May, the scientists published their discovery in Nature: three rocky bodies, dubbed TRAPPIST-1b, -1c and -1d, orbited the small star, they said.

But right around the time the study was published, Gillon noticed that TRAPPIST-1d was behaving oddly. When he went to get a closer look with the Very Large Telescope, the ESO's gigantic observatory in South America's Atacama Desert, he realized that the dip in brightness he thought came from 1d was actually caused by three planets, all transiting at the same time.